Review: the horror behind the horror in 'A Film Unfinished'

If it can seem like there's no end of films about the Holocaust, it might be because there is no bottom to the well of crime, inhumanity and evil described by that ghastly event.

Take "A Film Unfinished," a powerful, haunting documentary about work done by Nazi film crews in the Warsaw ghetto in the spring of 1942, just before mass deportations of Jews from that infernal netherworld to concentration camps began. The Nazis were attempting two things with their moviemaking: a depiction of the ghetto as a happy, well-fed, ordinary place, which it manifestly was not, and a distorted record of Jewish folkways and religious practices meant, ostensibly, to justify wiping Europe clean of an entire group of people.

Yael Hersonski, an Israeli film editor, has taken the Nazi footage, virtually none of which has ever been seen by the public, and shared it with a handful of survivors of the ghetto and the camps, augmenting their harrowing memories with official documents, diaries, transcripts of tribunals, and so on. The result is a blistering deconstruction of Nazi propaganda techniques and a deeply disturbing look at what constituted, for lack of a better word, life in the weeks before the final solution was implemented. Decades after the fact, Hersonski's witnesses can barely stand to see images of that Warsaw spring, and, frankly, even those who have seen such things for decades, as I have, will be rent by the film.

And it's not necessarily the images of corpses lining city streets or piled in mass graves that disturb most. The idea that people were forced to accept those horrors -- as well as starvation, beatings, theft, religious desecration, appallingly unhygienic overcrowding, and worse -- as daily events haunts even more. You look into the faces of these doomed souls and you see eternity -- and not the pretty, heavenly kind. "A Film Unfinished" leaves you grateful anew that the Nazis didn't get to finish their film or their scheme, and wondering what sort of warped souls led them even to begin.